At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study. Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They become concentrated up the food chain; as a result, killer whales, the top predators, are the most contaminated animals on the planet.

A year after the population of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales suffered devastating losses, Canadian officials say measures taken this season to protect the species have worked. With the summer fishing season in the Gulf of St. Lawrence drawing to a close, the federal Fisheries Department confirmed Friday that not one whale has died as a result of a ship strike or fishing gear entanglement — the main causes for most of the deaths last season.

Few conservation issues generate as emotional a response as whaling. Are we now about to see countries killing whales for profit again? Commercial whaling has been effectively banned for more than 30 years, after some whales were driven almost to extinction. But the International Whaling Committee (IWC) is currently meeting in Brazil and next week will give its verdict on a proposal from Japan to end the ban.

Everything on Kivalina is hard: there are no roads, few jobs, and rising waters. But everything gets better when the villagers catch a whale, which hasn't happened since 1994. By Saki Knafo.

If one is looking for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, why not practice on some of the non-human communication systems? By Laurance R. Doyle.

The rigorous program of monitoring humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), implemented by Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in 1985, augmented by additional data collected in southeastern Alaska since 1968, constitutes one of the longest studies of living whales in the world. This monitoring program, now a National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring Program Vital Sign, employed consistent methods for summer surveys from 1985 to 2014 to document the number of whales and gather...

A 36-million-year-old fossil skeleton is revealing a critical moment in the history of baleen whales: what happened when the ancestors of these modern-day filter feeders first began to distinguish themselves from their toothy, predatory predecessors. The fossil is the oldest known mysticete, a group that includes baleen whales, such as humpbacks, researchers report in the May 22 Current Biology.

It's the first preserved blue whale heart in the world. What weighs 600 pounds, has travelled internationally, and recently spent over four months in a vacuum chamber? A real, actual blue whale heart, the first one in the entire world to be preserved, now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto.

For the first time in 100 years, sizable numbers of humpback whales are being spotted in the waters off NYC, and it's thanks to years of environmental clean-up efforts, Popular Science reports.

Save the whale campaigns in and around Australia have existed for years. Globally, they remain very popular. Illegal whaling, as well as the impact of oil refinery at sea has made it a hot topic for environmental agencies for decades.

Joe Howlett helped to rescue a north Atlantic right whale that had become heavily tangled in rope and was struck by the mammal afterward

Research finds endangered Antarctic blue, fin and southern right whales struggling to recover despite hunting bans

The ancestors of today's gentle giants of the ocean were equipped with the razor-sharp teeth of a fearsome predator and could have hunted seals and penguins, rather than the tiny krill they eat today, scientists say. The findings feed into the puzzle about how modern Mysticeti whales, which include blue, humpback and right whales, came to evolve bristle-like structures — baleen — that allow them to filter food from the water.

An adult humpback whale is free after swimming in Maui waters entangled in rope. According to NOAA officials, the large whale was first reported entangled on Thursday by the captain of a fishing vessel. A trained response team soon deployed and used a small inflatable craft to approach the animal. Officials said the whale became "very active" upon their initial approach, so they waited for it to calm down before attempting to remove the braided rope.

A British Columbia court has ruled that Vancouver's park board didn't have the authority to ban whales, dolphins and porpoises at the city's aquarium. The decision follows Vancouver Aquarium's announcement last month that it will end the practice of displaying cetaceans in captivity. The Ocean Wise Conservation Association, the non-profit society that runs the aquarium, filed an application for judicial review last year challenging a bylaw amendment passed by the park board in May 2017 which prohibited keeping cetaceans in parks.

Japanese whaling vessels returned to port on Saturday after catching more than 300 of the mammals in the Antarctic Ocean without facing any protests by anti-whaling groups, officials said.

Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries. The rest of the world is finally listening in

Sperm whales are a genetic puzzle. The deep-diving, squid-eating giants that inspired Moby Dick are found in every ocean, where they can mate with partners from around the world; as such, they should be quite genetically diverse. Yet, their genetic diversity is actually very low, hinting that something killed a lot of them off in the past. And that something wasn’t whalers.

Japanese research vessels harpooned, killed and necropsied 333 Antarctic minke whales during an annual hunt last summer — and 122 of those whales were pregnant.

Humans have spent more than 10 centuries emptying the ocean of some of its most extraordinary animals. Today, a coalition of scientists and fishermen are trying to turn the tide – and learning that conservation is much harder than destruction

Sea Shepherd volunteers monitoring the Hvalur hf whaling station in Hvalfjordur Iceland have documented the slaughter of an endangered Blue whale on the night of July 7th, the 22nd endangered whale killed and butchered for export to Japan by Kristján Loftsson’s commercial whaling company since June 20th, 2018.

We need a better story than the pathetic one played out by beautiful animals that we haul into the sea of our ignorance, says the writer Philip Hoare

Iceland does not publicise its whale hunting industry much, and with declining public support, graphic images of what could be a Blue Whale being slaughtered is a PR nightmare for the country.

Whale is one of just 75 in an endangered group off the coast of Washington state and Canada. A grieving mother orca near Vancouver Island has been carrying her dead calf for four days, after refusing to leave her baby behind when the rest of her pod left. The mother whale, named J35 by researchers, gave birth Tuesday in what was initially a hopeful moment. Mother and female calf were seen swimming together that morning near Victoria, British Columbia, according to the Washington state-based Center for Whale Research.